Oswald's Tale (67 page)

So, when the question of an earlier visit comes up, Jeanne does her best to deny that she was there on Neely Street before April 13, yet she is careful not to commit herself altogether.

MR. JENNER.
Had you been there before?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
No.

MR. JENNER.
That is the first time you had ever been there?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
I don’t remember. Maybe I was. I don’t think so.

MR. JENNER.
All right.

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
I don’t think so.

MR. JENNER.
You got there. No, just relax—

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
I am trying to think hard because every little fact could be important.

MR. JENNER.
But you are excited. Relax, and tell me everything that occurred, chronologically, as best you can on that occasion. You came to the door and either Marina or Oswald came to the door, and you and your husband went in the home?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
That is right.

MR. JENNER.
Then, go on. Tell me about it.

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
And I believe from what I remember George sat down on the sofa and started talking to Lee, and Marina was showing me the house—that is why I said it looks like it was the first time, because why would she show me the house if I had been there before? Then we went to another room and she opens the closet, and I see the gun standing there. I said, what is the gun doing over there?
¹³

Now come the disclaimers on the telescopic sight. She admits to shooting skeet and loving to use a rifle in an amusement park, because she knows that one of the émigrés might mention as much, yet she maintains her fiction concerning the telescopic sight:

MR. JENNER.
And then other things that arrested your attention, as I gather from what you have said, is that you saw a telescopic sight?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Yes; but I didn’t know what it was . . . It was not a smooth, plain rifle. That is for sure.

MR. JENNER.
. . . were you concerned about it?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
I just asked what on earth is he doing with a rifle?

MR. JENNER.
What did she say?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
She said, “Oh, he just loves to shoot . . . he goes in the park and he shoots at leaves and things like that.” But it didn’t strike me too funny, because I personally love skeet shooting . . .

MR. JENNER.
Didn’t you think it was strange to have someone say he is going in a public park and shooting leaves?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
But he was taking the baby out. He goes with her, and that was his amusement . . .
¹⁴

Not only has Marina led her to the gun, but now Lee is using it to shoot leaves! In a public park! If June is with him, presumably other children are in the park as well! Jeanne is doing her best to diminish Oswald’s potential for violence in her eyes and, collaterally, in her husband’s eyes. Indeed, she will go further than George. She pretends that Oswald did not have a large reaction to her husband’s now embattled remark:

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
. . . George, of course, with his sense of humor . . . said, “Did you take a pot shot at Walker by any chance?” And we started laughing our heads off, big joke, big George’s joke . . .

MR. JENNER.
Were you looking to see whether [Oswald] had a change of expression?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
No; none at all. It was just a joke . . .

MR. JENNER.
But did you not look at him to see if he reacted?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
No; I didn’t take it seriously enough to look at him.
¹⁵

The De Mohrenschildts would leave Dallas on April 19 for New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. In the capital, George would shepherd his patron, Clemard Charles, president of the Banque Commerciale de Haiti, into a meeting with CIA staff officer Tony Czaikowski on May 7, 1963. The indication from a CIA liaison officer named Sam Kail was that “Charles might prove useful in ongoing efforts aimed at overthrowing Castro . . .”
¹⁶

MR. JENNER.
You returned to Dallas in May?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
End of May.

MR. JENNER.
Did you call the Oswalds?

MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
No; we didn’t. We heard that they were already gone . . . we had a card from them in New Orleans with their address. But I don’t think we ever wrote to them . . . We were going to send them a Christmas card.
¹⁷

From Marina’s narrative: . . .
In the meantime, I decided that if Lee did not have a job, it would be better to go to a different city. I was also afraid that in Dallas Lee would be very tempted to repeat his attempt on Walker. I suggested that we leave for New Orleans—Lee’s home town. There he had relatives. I thought he would be ashamed to do the same things there as he had done in Dallas. I wanted to get as far as possible from the occasion of sin.
¹⁸

George gives one more disclaimer:

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
I repeat again that they were out of my mind completely—after the last time we saw them.
¹⁹

It is worth repeating: The nearest we have come to a smoking gun is Edward Epstein’s discovery that the CIA contact reports on De Mohrenschildt for April and May of 1963 were removed from the file. Would those contact reports have failed to mention De Mohrenschildt’s probable conclusion that Oswald was the man who shot at Walker?

In the notes to his book
Legend,
Edward J. Epstein gives us, without citation, this terse piece of information:

. . . in 1964, George De Mohrenschildt told a friend in Houston, Jim Savage, that he had inadvertently given Marina the money Oswald used to buy the rifle. Marina said to him that spring, “Remember the twenty-five dollars you gave me? Well, that fool husband of mine used it to buy a rifle.”
²⁰

Let us add up the damage from the CIA’s point of view:

1. A contract agent, George De Mohrenschildt, serving as handler for Oswald, knew in advance that Oswald had a rifle with scope and notified the Agency before April 10.

2. After the Walker episode, De Mohrenschildt was all but convinced that Oswald had been involved in the shooting, and he so notified the Agency. His handlers at Langley now possessed the knowledge that a man in Dallas who had once defected to the Soviet Union had probably taken a shot at General Walker.

3. If De Mohrenschildt also admitted to his case officer that he had given Oswald the money to purchase a rifle with a telescopic sight, then the Agency, in the event this was disclosed, would be damned in the eyes of the media for doing nothing about a putative assassin in Dallas whom they were, at one remove, responsible for arming.

4. If ever confirmed, points 1, 2, and 3 would be small but containable disasters in public relations. Harder to measure was the potential for damage in those missing contact reports. If those papers were ever to be exposed, their routing symbols would reveal which CIA desks had become privy to the knowledge that Oswald was a putative assassin. If the CIA had any suspicions that a few of its people might have been involved in the assassination of JFK—and, indeed, how could they not, given the boiling disaffection at JM/WAVE in Miami over Kennedy’s withdrawal of support from Operation Mongoose?—then the routing of De Mohrenschildt’s contact reports could show that inside knowledge on Oswald and Walker had reached some of the most unaccountable and hair-trigger of the Agency’s enclaves.

Given such fears, how could the contact reports not be removed from the file? If there is real ground to point 4, then the CIA had a great deal more to be concerned about than a spell of bad public relations.

We must leave it here. If there is any connection between these speculative matters and Oswald’s adventures in New Orleans, it may well be located in some undefined species of Bermuda Triangle then forming among right-wing money, CIA malcontents, and ex-FBI men. The question, for which there will not be one answer but two, is whether Oswald’s activities in New Orleans must then be comprehended on these two different levels: 1) Was everything he did done simply because he was Oswald? Or, 2) to the contrary, was he functioning as a provocateur? Of course, as he would have seen it, he was using the people who were using him.

PART IV

THE BIG EASY

1

“A Terrifically Sad Life”

From an unpublished interview with Marguerite Oswald in 1976:

INTERVIEWER:
They said you were very pretty.

MARGUERITE:
I was. Very pretty . . . . My hair was absolutely gorgeous. And my teeth . . . Oh, I had pearl teeth. They were just beautiful. They really were. I was very nice looking, like, uh, I have to say it because I really was . . . . My complexion was good and my eyes changed with the color of my clothes, you know, blue, they got blue, green, they got green. And my hair was nice and curly and wavy. I was a very popular young lady.

INTERVIEWER:
How much education did you have?

MARGUERITE:
None. I only went to high school one year.

INTERVIEWER:
Was your husband, Robert E. Lee Oswald, interested in General Robert E. Lee?

MARGUERITE:
His mother was.

INTERVIEWER:
His mother?

MARGUERITE:
[She] was very much in love with him.
¹

An old acquaintance of Lillian Murret and Marguerite Oswald named Myrtle Evans was paid a visit mid-morning on Thursday, May 9, 1963, at her real estate office in New Orleans. It was one day less than a month following the attempt on General Walker’s life.

MRS. EVANS
. . . .this young man was at the door and . . . did I have an apartment to rent? . . . I told him I might be able to find something for him, and he told me he had a wife and child over in Texas, and that he was going to bring them over here as soon as he could find something . . .

When we were walking down the steps I looked at him real hardlike, and I didn’t recognize him, but something made me ask, “I know you, don’t I?” and he said, “Sure; I am Lee Oswald; I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.” I said, “Lee Oswald, what are you doing in this country? I thought you were in Russia. I thought you had given up your American citizenship . . .” and he said, “No,” he said, “I went over there, but I didn’t give up any citizenship.” He said he had been back in the States for quite a while, and that he had brought his Russian wife back with him . . . and so I said, “Well, come on, Lee, I don’t know anybody that will take children,” I said, “but we will just ride up and down the streets and see what we can find.” So we rode in and out and all around Baronne and Napoleon and Louisiana Avenue, and Carondelet, you know, just weaving in and out the streets, and looking for any signs of apartments for rent, so we finally rode down Magazine Street . . . and all of a sudden he said, “Oh, there’s a sign,” and . . . we went up and rang the doorbell, and . . . one apartment was very good for the money . . .

I said, “Lee . . . this is the best you can do” . . . it had a living room that was a tremendous room . . . .and it had a front screened porch, and a yard, and . . . an iron fence, like they use around New Orleans . . . I told Lee to give her the deposit, so she could get the electricity turned on, because he wanted his wife to come for Saturday [two days later. Then we] got in the car and rode on home, and I think I . . . ran to the grocery store too and got a pound of ham and some stuff, and we sat and ate lunch, and he drank a Coke, I think, and we talked, and I asked him, I said, “Well, how does it feel to be back in New Orleans?” and he said, “I have wanted to move back to New Orleans.”

He said, “New Orleans is my home.”
²

That conversation brought back quite a bit of the past, and Myrtle Evans thought of how she had not even heard of Lee Oswald’s being in Russia until she learned about it by running into Lillian Murret:

MRS. EVANS
. . . . I hadn’t seen her in years. I am Catholic and she is Catholic, [and] they had this card party . . . over at the Fontainebleau Motel, and a number of ladies was present, and it was for charity, and we played bingo and canasta . . . and so she said, “Oh, Myrtle, did you hear about Lee, he gave up his American citizenship and went to Russia, behind the Iron Curtain,” and I said, “My God, no,” and she said, “Yes.” . . .

MR. JENNER.
Was this the first you knew or had become aware of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was living in Russia?

MRS. EVANS.
Yes; now, it was undoubtedly in the newspapers and on TV but I sometimes get to doing a million things and I don’t get a chance to read a newspaper . . . . So a lot of times I don’t know what’s going on, but she said . . . “Lee has done gone and given up his United States citizenship,” and I said, “Poor Marguerite, that’s terrible; I feel so sorry for her.”
³

Myrtle did. She spoke to Mr. Jenner about Marguerite Oswald for as long as he wished to hear.

MRS. EVANS.
Yes; Marguerite has a terrifically sad life, and she was just a wonderful, gorgeous wife. She married this John Pic and had his boy, and he didn’t want any children at all, so she left him and went to live with her sister and [her next husband] Oswald . . . was a Virginia Life Insurance salesman [who] started taking her out . . . and then she married him, and . . . had the two boys, and they were very happy, and then one day he was out mowing the lawn, and he had this terrific pain, and she was several months pregnant with Lee . . .

Now, he left her with $10,000, I think, in insurance, so she sold her home, and by that time her two boys were old enough, so she put them in this home . . . and went to work [and] she had got this couple to come and stay with Lee . . . some young couple. I don’t know their names. She said people told her that when Lee was in the high chair, that he used to cry a lot and they thought they were whipping little Lee, so she came home unexpectedly one night, and the child had welts on his legs, and she told them to get out and get out now . . . all her love, I think, she dumped on Lee after her husband died . . . . she always sort of felt sorry for Lee for that reason, I think, and sort of leaned toward Lee.
⁴

Well, Mr. Jenner was patient. He listened. Now he wanted to know how mother and son had comported themselves years later, when they came back from New York because at that time Myrtle Evans had rented an apartment to them in a building she lived in and managed:

MR. JENNER.
What kind of housekeeper was Margie?

MRS. EVANS.
A very good housekeeper; very tasty; she . . . had a lot of natural talent that way and she was not lazy . . . . she kept a very neat house, and she was always so lovely herself. That’s why, when I saw her on TV, after all this happened, she looked so old and haggard, and I said, “That couldn’t be Margie,” but of course it was, but if you had known Margie before all this happened, you would see what I mean. She was beautiful. She had beautiful wavy hair.

MR. JENNER.
What about Lee?

MRS. EVANS.
Well . . . when he wanted supper, or something to eat, he would scream like a bull. He would holler, “Maw, where’s my supper?” Some of the time Margie would be downstairs talking to me or something, and when he would holler at her, she would jump up right away and go and get him something to eat. Her whole life was wrapped up in that boy and she spoiled him to death. [If you go back earlier] it’s my opinion that Lee . . . demanded so much of his mother’s attention that they didn’t get along—I mean her and Ekdahl, because of Lee . . .

MR. JENNER.
That’s just your surmise?

MRS. EVANS.
Yes, sir; I can’t help feeling that if she had put Lee in a boarding school, she might have hung onto her meal ticket, and considering Mr. Ekdahl’s condition and everything, if all that hadn’t happened, she would have been sitting on top of the world. She wouldn’t have had another worry in her life, as far as money goes, but instead her children came first, I mean, Lee. She just poured out all her love on him, it seemed like.
⁵